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Q for Mortals Version 3 Now Free Online

Kx is pleased to announce that Jeffry Borror’s book Q for Mortals Version 3, An Introduction to Q Programming, is now available for free online at code.kx.comhere.

Q for Mortals serves as both an introduction and reference guide to programming in q/kdb+, and replaces an earlier version. In the latest edition, Jeffry includes expanded real-life applications based on his experience teaching and using q at a large financial institution where kdb+/q has been widely deployed for many years.

Kx’s Simon Garland said about Q for Mortals version 3: “I recommend it for programmers and users of all levels who need to know about the capabilities of kdb+. Even someone who is managing a project has something to learn from this.”

The following is an excerpt from an introductory section called The Evolution of q.

Arthur Whitney developed the q programming language and its database kdb+. Released by Kx Systems, Inc. in 2003, the primary design objectives of q are expressiveness, speed and efficiency. In these, it is beyond compare. The design trade-off is a terseness that can be disconcerting to programmers coming from verbose traditional database programming environments – e.g., C++, Java, C# or Python – and a relational DBMS. Whereas the q programming gods revel in programs resembling an ASCII core dump, this manual is for the rest of us.

Q evolved from APL (A Programming Language), which was first invented as a mathematical notation by Kenneth Iverson at Harvard University in the 1950s. APL was introduced in the 1960s by IBM as a vector programming language, meaning that it processes a list of numbers in a single operation. It was successful in finance and other industries that required heavy number crunching.

The mitochondrial DNA of q traces from APL to A to A+ and to k. All were well suited to performing complex calculations quickly on vectors. What’s new in q/kdb+ is that it processes large volumes of time-series data very efficiently in the relational paradigm. Its syntax allows “select” expressions that are similar to SQL 92, and its collection of built-in functions provides a complete and powerful stored procedure language.

There is also some Lisp in q’s genes: the fundamental data construct of q is a list. Although the notation and terminology are different, symbols are drawn from their counterparts in Scheme.

The APL lineage of q also shows the influence of functional programming. In his 1977 Turing Award lecture that introduced purely functional programming, Backus acknowledged inspiration from APL. While q is not purely functional, it is strongly functional in that even its basic data structures, list and dictionary, are viewed as mathematical mappings.

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